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A Testimony to the Generosity of Our Supporters

Colin G. Campbell

The campaign for
Colonial Williamsburg soon will close its books, tally the numbers, and reckon
its achievements. By all accounts, we are within reach of our goals, and the
ledgers already reveal considerable success.

The first
comprehensive fund-raising drive undertaken by the Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation, it is a $500 million campaign to provide much-needed support for
our primary areas of activity: People, Place, and Purpose. That is to say: to
enhance staff resources; to augment, maintain, and preserve buildings and
facilities; and to advance educational endeavors.

At press time,
supporters had contributed more than $423 million
in funds and objects, about 85 percent of the campaign target, and a testimony
to the generosity of supporters across the nation. The foundation is grateful
to every individual donor.

Individuals
are the campaign's mainstays. The effort has benefited enormously by support
from foundations, corporations, and other institutions, but the great majority
of gifts are credited to individuals. And credit they deserve.

Colonial
Williamsburg has recognized outstanding philanthropy by naming positions,
endowments, and facilities in honor of donors who gave to them so
munificently—and the campaign plan provides many more chances to show the
foundation's gratitude.

Success in the
campaign's People initiative has added four named chairs to the foundation's
roster of endowed positions, as well as a named curatorship and named
conservation internships. There are opportunities to lengthen the list with
positions in Research, Collections, and Historic Trades, as well as in the
Historic Area.

Particularly promising is the Nation
Builders program, which supports interpretations of eighteenth-century citizens
of the Williamsburg community famous and little known, slave and free. Their
stories speak to the challenges of the creation of our republic—lessons in
liberty for the generations to come that are so central to our plan to make
Education for Citizenship the integrating theme of foundation offerings.

Achievements in the Place portion of the
campaign have associated donor names with the Group Arrivals Building, Great
Hopes Plantation, the Benjamin Powell House, the Pasteur & Galt Apothecary,
the Peyton Randolph House and Kitchen, the Raleigh Tavern, and the Stables, as
well Historic Area preservation, gardens, and interiors. Opportunities for
recognition remain in venues as diverse as the Governor's Palace, the Capitol,
Wetherburn's Tavern, the Courthouse, the Magazine, the Costume Design Center,
classrooms, museum galleries—and more than 110 others.

Named endowments for
Purpose projects now support the foundation's Teacher Institute, the Fife and
Drum Corps, and our African American programming, as well as history education,
the library, interpreter training, music programming, and preservation
research. Still on the campaign agenda is support for these activities as well
as for purposes as varied as children's programming, collections acquisitions, folk
art museum galleries, new media development, electronic field trips, teacher
scholarships, and Internet projects.

Naming a building, a
position, or a support endowment goes only part way toward expressing Colonial
Williamsburg's full appreciation for the range of donor gifts and for the
kindness of so many others who have joined, or will join, in the campaign. Be
assured that each name records a significant campaign achievement, a success
for which Colonial Williamsburg is deeply grateful. All will be recognized and
celebrated at campaign's end.

I hope that when the rolls are closed on
the Campaign for Colonial Williamsburg, your name will be recorded among the
Americans who so generously support our mission: that the future may learn from
the past.